The last track I hear from Joy Crookes’s new album before our interview is House with a Pool, which is the perfect soundtrack for my arrival at 180 The Strand in London – heading up to members’ club Soho House located on the top floors. We’re spending a heatwave early May afternoon drinking picantes on the rooftop, as others splash around in the pool trying to cool down from the intense 26-degree rays.
Shielding our eyes from the sun, we delve into each others’ approach to creativity, the dogma that keeps us sane, our approach to relationships – a kaleidoscope of topics spoken about with such fervour that a one-hour interview slot turns into a full afternoon of conversation. “I almost hate that I have a membership here, as I feel like the best thing about London is that you’re confronted by reality often,” the 26-year-old says, reclining in her chair. I interject with the lyrics to LDN by Lily Allen. The song is a bittersweet love letter to the capital that, though sung in a heavily-dramatised cockney accent and nearly two decades old, is still an accurate depiction of a city of intense duality: of the haves and the have nots; of the moments of pure joy that you can’t find anywhere else contrasted with real strife and struggle. Joy agrees with Allen’s observations. “Then COVID meant people stopped talking to each other and went into places like [Soho House]. It started to feel a bit like LA”
You’re more likely to bump into Joy in South London. That’ll be why this isn’t the first time we’ve met. I media trained Joy before her first studio album at her publicist’s office in Brixton; I bumped into her in torrential rain at Rally festival in Southwark (“it’s quite an alternative line-up”); and I’d seen her as we both frolicked around Peckham bars such as Jumbi, eclectic Irish pub Skehans and SET – a members’ club with a far less exclusive annual membership of £8, which subsidises art projects and ‘pay what you feel’ local cafes.
Joy was nominated for the BRITs Rising Star award back in 2020 before her debut album Skin peaked at number 5 on the UK charts the following year. Her critically-acclaimed feat introduced British radio stations to her emotive vocals – a voice that, despite only being in her mid-twenties, has a deep, rich and wise timbre of someone who has lived many lives. Joy’s visuals are just as heartfelt, with the videos for 19th Floor and When You Were Mine paying homage to the streets and cultures that raised her: snapshots of Irish dancing, Bangladeshi traditional clothing, high-rise blocks and Brixton markets – her grandmother previously sold biriyani from a trolley she used to push around the area before moving back to Bangladesh. And Feet Don’t Fail Me Now nods to her heritage through traditional Bangladeshi dress, while she rides motorcycles with a crew of bikers attached by Rapunzel-like braids (before Doechii’s lauded performance that utilised a similar style).
So where has one of Britain’s rising stars been for the last four years? “I wasn’t very well,” she says. “I basically had a mental health crisis between albums.” While we are waiting for staff to deliver us some cigarettes to compliment the cocktails, I ask her about some lyrics that hit me particularly hard: “‘Who am I when I’m out of your sight? I want to see how we look apart” on Somebody to You. “It’s such an important question for women trying to define their full adult selves outside of relationships that no longer serve them,” I say. Though the lyrics sound like they could be spoken by someone after a bad romantic break-up (“that’s intentional”, she says) it actually hints at a familial relationship that had broken down in the interim and caused Joy to rethink what her life looks like without her reliance on that relative. In that vacuum, she did a lot of soul searching. “It’s funny you picked that line out of all of the lines on the album, because it’s kind of what the whole thing is about,” she explains.
From the first track on her sophomore album, Juniper [released on September 26th] it’s evident that her four-year hiatus has been about self-growth. It shows on the record: how she chronicles the uncertainty and chaos of her mid-twenties; the vulnerability and soulful inflections betraying the depth of pain she’s experienced from one album to the other. Brave hits you in the chest, as she stretches her range to a falsetto at its crescendo to announce her step towards a new horizon: “I’m so sick, I’m so tired I can’t keep losing my mind / I want to be brave, I want to be in love / It’s time I stopped running away. I should stay.” Any avoidantly attached listener will resonate with the track’s sentiment. “It’s about being so scared of love and truly being seen and knowing you have to do it anyway,” she says. “I reached flow state and wrote that in one day, and it was recorded in basically one take with a handheld mic on a sofa. It’s a song where I feel like I am transported back in time.”
By now, we’ve been immersed in rapid-fire conversation under the glare of the sun for hours, and the 180 DJ behind us keeps increasing the volume, so Joy excuses herself to go to the toilet. When she returns, she does so with a huge smile on her face that reveals the glint from the little golden grill on her tooth. “They were playing [my new single] Mathematics! How weird is that? I was weeing to the sound of my own voice. You couldn’t write it.” A toilet break is such an important part of any social interaction. It’s the sacred time on a night out where you have a quiet moment of clarity about how you’re coming across or what’s going on around you. “That’s so weird, because that’s literally what my album art is about!” She pulls out her phone to reveal a photograph: an outtake of a night in a strip club in LA, where she stares in the mirror while the action of the bathroom happens around her. “We’ve tried to recreate that same moment and feeling with [photographer] Ewen Spencer.”
Mathematics, featuring Kano, is already tracking to be a hit, with more than 2 million streams on Spotify. Her producer Blue May also collaborates with the legendary British rapper and invited him to the studio to listen to the record. “He was really sweet, gave advice and was humming Mathematics as he left. I got a FaceTime from Blue, and he was like, ‘I need you to listen to this,’ and it was a surprise Kano verse. As a fan, it was so nice to hear him rap about love and be so vulnerable and raw.”
The video “finds the extraordinary in the mundane” as they navigate marriage, parenthood and even death together under one roof. “I wanted to play with the age-old stereotype in music, where a singer and rapper do something together and it feels really contrived and sexual. What if we build a life together but have a complex dynamic like a French film?” asks Joy. “Maybe, secretly, my creative endeavour was exploring that because as a child I grew up in a family that maybe wasn’t so functional, and my parents didn’t stay together. It recreates that feeling of reading between the lines but not knowing what’s going on.”
Despite the fact she speaks so elegantly about her creative vision, there are still moments of uncertainty. Even today I see glimpses of her imposter syndrome. Earlier we bumped into Gabriel Moses, a rising fashion photographer who was also behind the design for this year’s BRIT awards, while we searched for a seat by the pool that wasn’t in the splash zone. His solo work is currently showing at 180 Studios on the building’s ground floor. “There’s a really good exhibition downstairs,” Joy jokes before we walk away. Once we’re a safe distance, she cringes. “Oh my God, why did I just say that? Do I sound lame?” It’s endearing to hear her anxieties because these are the thoughts that connect us all, no matter how confident we appear.
In her newly-released video for Carmen, Joy reveals her younger obsession with being the Eurocentric standard of beauty – flowing blonde hair and big boobs – and comically kills that insecurity by throwing Carmen down the stairs in a scene akin to Death Becomes Her. The moral of the story? Chasing perfection will destroy you. Music has always been a way for Joy to process the things going on in her life. Paris sees her wrestle with the Catholic guilt around exploring her sexuality on her own terms. Harnessing her own desire is a recurring topic with Joy: the day before, on the set of the GLAMOUR cover shoot, one of her best friends – makeup artist Mata Mariélle – asked Joy what she was thinking about and she loudly declared: “cock”. “I feel like I’m in heat,” she jokes.
Though Joy is happier – currently in a long-term relationship with artist and illustrator Moya Garrison-Msingwana, who she speaks of fondly – and finding happiness through her art again, she still faces the typical anxieties we all go through. “I sometimes worry I’m not interesting enough for this industry,” she says. “Men don’t have to be that interesting to receive a lot of attention and praise, and then I look at the greats like Lauryn Hill and see how she was treated in the industry and worry about my future.”
Joy’s own ambition to become one of Britain’s legendary singers is years in the making. Hailing from Elephant and Castle and born to a Bengali mother and an Irish father, the music in the house was varied. Her Irish grandmother grew up singing in church, while her father was a child of the post-punk generation, introducing her to artists while driving her to Irish dancing lessons in his Peugeot convertible. They’d listen to Nick Cave, King Tubby and Gregory Isaacs together, while her mother listened to lots of Indian music. “She also introduced me to Nelly Furtado,” Joy recalls. Later, she used YouTube to teach herself how to play the guitar in her teens – though mostly to cure adolescent boredom rather than as a vocation. When Joy left school at 16, she went into hospitality, working at a Polish restaurant near her family home. “That was one of the most racist experiences of my life, actually. I would pass customers the cutlery and they would look at me and then they would clean it,” she says. However, uploading her music to YouTube attracted the attention of the industry and pulled her into entertainment.
The publicity around her first album has meant that, though fans are often kind when they spot her in public, she’s developed a strained relationship with attention, even opting out of travelling by train if she can help it. “I don’t want to be perceived,” she says. “I went to Dialled In festival in disguise, because it’s a place with such a large South Asian community who would definitely recognise me.”
Coming at music from an accidental angle almost makes Joy an observer in the industry. Even glamorous parties with famous musicians become a bit of an out-of-body experience.
“You’re told your whole life that the back rooms with famous people doing drugs are where the magic happens,” she says. The problem is, you’re usually subjected to the chatter of people who are really trying to make a point that they’re very smart and cool. “I don’t really go out to seem intelligent. I go out to feel dumb,” she laughs.
Throughout our conversation Joy has a long list of behaviours she feels she can’t tolerate, from clout chasers to vipers who are out to get money via any means necessary. Navigating through the music scene from a young age means she’s careful about who she allows into her orbit or how she’s presented, and for good reason. “As a survivor of sexual abuse,” which she has previously discussed in interviews and bravely explores on her 2021 track ‘Unlearn You’, “sometimes I might seem like I have dick-cutting energy,” she says. “Does that sound bad?” As the world currently watches the Diddy trial unfold in New York, revealing a darker reality hidden beneath his ‘party boy’ persona, her caution becomes particularly topical and entirely understandable. Her manager Charlie has been a protective figure. “She’s probably the most consistent person in my life that has looked out for me in adulthood,” Joy explains. Lyrics for one of the songs on the album came to her while she was tripping at Glastonbury and a creepy man started ruining her night. “Charlie was like, ‘I’d kill for you,’ and at that moment she just seemed like she was glowing so bright I couldn’t even look at her.” Thus the lines “Girl, you burn bright / Cut like a diamond / Safe in your light” were born on I Know You’d Kill. “There are so many predators in the music industry,” she says.
It’s in this environment that Joy has developed her no-nonsense attitude. “Sometimes I’m asked: ‘Oh, how do you think being Bangladeshi and Irish influences your music?’ which I think is a bit of a wild question. It's not specific, and it feels really vague and a bit stupid. So I answer with: “Oh, I think the reason why I have an orange guitar is because I grew up eating so much turmeric,” she says, deadpan. “Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.”
At this point in Joy’s life and career, autonomy is key. That tracks with how much autonomy she’s had in the current album, on which she sings songs she has written by herself, composed all the string arrangements from Blue’s flat in Bethnal Green and is heavily involved with the creative treatment for the music videos and even the marketing. “I’m in an idyllic place with the label, as I’ve been left alone to get on with [the project],” she says.
While Skin was a tour through the cultures and spaces Joy inhabits, her new album is fittingly named to exhibit Joy’s introspection and personal metamorphosis. Even though this album is a chronicle of her lowest points, she’s emerged out of that dark period wise enough to help others navigate the industry. “I want to start an agency for the protection of musical artists. Something that feels like it gives guidance, or is almost a union, because I spend a lot of my time on the phone to people in crisis because of the way this industry really plays with you,” she says. Over the years, she’s found her peers – from Miso Extra to Holly Harby Dweller – to be an invaluable resource for uplift and support. “Me and Jai Paul will just sit in my car talking about how weird the world is right now and eating McFlurries,” she laughs.
And so Joy begins to gear up for a summer preparing for the release of her sophomore album in September, which is the sum of her artistic and personal growth. She will be able to start touring her new material in the summer – notably at Glastonbury, which, in her opinion, is “the best festival in the world” because “it makes you feel like a community of people who are all free, just for a few days”. And therein lies Joy’s mission statement for her next album, and likely for the remainder of her twenties: freedom: “The most important messaging for this era for me musically is that I just want to be me. More comfortable with myself, unapologetic, and unashamed.”
Joy Crookes's new album, Juniper, will be released on September 26th, followed by a UK tour in November.
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